The evolution of computers and networking technologies from high-cost, low performance data processing systems to low cost, high-performance communication, problem solving, and entertainment systems has provided a cost-effective and time saving means to lessen the burden of performing every day tasks such as correspondence, bill paying, shopping, budgeting information and gathering, etc. For example, a computing system interfaced to the Internet, by way of wire or wireless technology, can provide a user with a channel for nearly instantaneous access to a wealth of information from a repository of web sites and servers located around the world. Such a system, as well, allows a user to not only gather information, but also to provide information to disparate sources. As such, online data storing and management has become increasingly popular.
Enterprise application integration can be the secure and orchestrated sharing of processes and/or data between applications which were not originally designed for such sharing and/or interaction. Conventionally, a service technology (e.g., web service, etc., which are discussed below) or an integration adapter can be written around an existing Line of Business (LOB) system to enable such applications to participate in integration processes. Specifically, the service technology or the integration adapter can be written around specific application program interfaces (APIs) to enable various applications to be “normalized” for data consumption. These adapters have traditionally achieved this normalization by reducing the target systems to appear as “messaging systems” in order to capture LOB specific aspects in an actual message that can be transferred to a backend system (e.g., a LOB application). Yet, such adapter techniques are extremely unfeasible since exchanging messages cannot handle such high levels of abstraction and semantically rich data.
As mentioned, various service technologies can enable data access in accordance with enterprise application integration. For instance, such technologies can include web services, simple object access protocol (SOAP) used to access web services, web service description language (WSDL) specification to define available methods of a web service, and other similar technologies such as representational state transfer (REST), JavaScript object notation (JSON), and other remote procedure call (RPC) and service contract definition languages. Software developers can leverage these technologies to create service applications useable by consumers and administrators to access data, such as in a platform or framework. Data access can include addition, deletion, modification, viewing, and the like. The service technologies can present a service contract definition that defines one or more methods made available by the service; a remote client can access the definition to initiate a request to the service for data access. Although such web services offer a more “human friendly” programming model and appeal of wide reach and support for several popular web service standard protocols, such services require a static, monolithic service contract declared. These static service contracts are problematic and often impossible in light of the numerous methods available/desired and the ever-changing informational request related to LOB systems.